Review Apps

Review apps are a powerful collaboration tool to discuss about a new features between members of your organization. We implemented this feature as part of our SCM integration.

What Are Review Apps?

Let say that you have worked some hours on an awesome new feature. It’s time to show the world your work and to open a new Pull/Merge Request (PR) on the SCM tool (even if it’s not fully done). With review apps enabled on Scalingo, we will create a new application (called a review app) with the code of the new feature. You can now share the result of your work, to get it validated, with all people involved, even if they are not in the tech field.

Maybe they will tell you to change something like adding tests or to change a button color. You need to push your following modifications on the branch involved in the PR to update the review app.

Once all of our teammates are satisfied and the PR is closed, we will automatically delete the review app. You can disable this behavior or add a delay to fit your needs. This latter setting means that you can still review PR after your dev team has closed the PR.

The owner of the parent application is the only account which can manually delete the review app, via the Settings menu of the review app, submenu App management, in the dashboard, or via our CLI.

If you don’t want to create a new review app for each PR you can also choose among open PRs of your app to manually deploy a review app.

It is also possible to manually create a review app using the Scalingo CLI:

scalingo --app my-app integration-link-manual-review-app 42
-----> Manual review app created for app 'my-app' with pull/merge request id '42'.

In this example, 42 is the pull request or merge request ID.

A manually created review app is instantly deleted after the pull request is closed.

Addons, Collaborators and Environment Variables

If you’ve enabled review apps, a new application will be created every time a new PR is opened in your linked SCM-hosted repository. This new application is a child application.

Child applications clone some information from the parent app:

This default behavior can be customized using a scalingo.json file, see: configuration of review apps.

It is however important to understand that the customization can allow to connect directly the Review App to the parent application database and addons, so Review Apps must be enabled only when trusted sources are allowed to create merge requests in the source code repositories. As a consequence, Scalingo prevents, by default, Review Apps from being created from forks of the original repository.

Accepting Review Apps deployments from forks

When your project also accepts pull requests from forked repositories, and you want to take advantage of the automatic deployment of the corresponding reviews apps, you can activate the automatic deployment of review apps from forks.

In the Dashboard, go to Review Apps configuration, and edit the setting for automatic deployment. Check “I want to allow review apps coming from forks”, then click on Update. As soon as the next pull request opened from a fork is received, a complete clone of your application will be automatically created!

When using the CLI, add the --allow-review-apps-from-forks flag to your integration-link configuration and accept the warning message.

$ scalingo --app my-app integration-link-update --deploy-review-apps --allow-review-apps-from-forks
  /!\  Only allow automatic review apps deployments from forks if you trust the owners of those forks, as this could lead to security issues. More info here: https://doc.scalingo.com/platform/app/review-apps#addons-collaborators-and-environment-variables

? Allow automatic creation of review apps from forks? Yes
-----> Your app 'my-app' integration link has been updated.

Configuration of Review Apps

Having a strict copy of the parent application is sometimes not desirable. You might not want to copy production credentials, or it is sometimes required to start a custom task after the initialization of the app. That’s where the Scalingo JSON manifest becomes useful.

If there are valid reasons and cases where configuring the scalingo.json is the adequate solution, it is important to understand that it is sometimes not the appropriate one. As Review Apps can connect to their parent database, and addons, this means personal, or health-related information can be exposed.

As a consequence, Scalingo recommends not to enable Review Apps for production applications. The preferred approach is to create a second application linked to the same repository. This second, separate application can then have Review Apps, while protecting production data.

As a quick example, here is a sample scalingo.json that customize the environment variable CANONICAL_HOST_URL for a child app:

{
  "env": {
    "CANONICAL_HOST_URL": {
      "generator": "url"
    }
  }
}

Here, the value of the environment variable CANONICAL_HOST_URL will contain the URL to reach the newly deployed app. The scalingo.json configuration always takes precedence over parent app configuration.

Protect a Review App with Basic Auth

You may want to protect access to your review apps so that authentication is mandatory before reaching the review app. A solution is to update the scalingo.json file to look like:

{
  "env": {
    "BASIC_AUTH": {
      "value": true
    }
  }
}

Then you can test the presence of this environment variable in your application and setup Basic Auth in case this environment is defined in the environment of the application.

You can also generate a different password for each review app by using the secret generator in the scalingo.json file:

{
  "env": {
    // ...
    "PASSWORD": {
      "description": "Basic auth password for review apps",
      "generator": "secret"
    }
  }
}

The environment variable PASSWORD should be used by your application to configure Basic Auth on your app.

Run a Task After the First Deployment of a Review App

When a review app is created, you might want to execute a custom action like seeding its database. This can be done using the first-deploy script in the scalingo.json manifest. If such a property is defined, the given command will be executed as a postdeploy hook after the first deployment.

{
  "scripts": {
    "first-deploy": "bundle exec rake db:deploy db:seed"
  }
}

Run a Task After Each Deployment of a Review App

To run a custom command after each deployment of a review app, you need to define a postdeploy hook for your application. However defining a postdeploy hook would also impact the parent application.

To make sure only review apps are impacted, the common practice is to define a custom environment variable in the scalingo.json manifest:

{
  "env": {
    "IS_REVIEW_APP": {
      "value": "true"
    }
  }
}

Then use the environment variable in your postdeploy task to check if it is executed in the scope of a review app or not.

Is It Possible to Create Review Apps If My Code Is Hosted at a Different Place?

We implement review apps for code hosted on GitHub or GitLab. However you can set it up for your specific case thanks to the Scalingo API:

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Review Apps

Platform - App

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